SeptemberJanuary: On Starting Goals Now

If I could copy and paste a month of the year and set it as all months, it would be September.

Just replicate this month over and over, while progressing forward of course. Just make every new month feel like September.

And I would do this for the following reason: I feel this is the month I can change in a positive direction the most. And I’m not the only one with this sentiment.

September-January Momentum

Jon Acuff came up with the #septemberjanuary challenge with a simple premise in mind: September offers a great opportunity to start a goal because it’s a natural month of change. There is back to school momentum, vacations have ended, and the season is literally changing as cooling temperatures begin arriving.

Acuff wants you to do something every day of the month of September. I participated in this challenge a few years ago by writing and posting a new guitar riff to social media every day in September. Nothing gets the juices flowing like forcing creation and then sharing it immediately.

Cal Newport recently entered the September Is Special To Start Changing Your Life arena with a podcast episode teaching the methods to overhaul your life in the next four months, starting of course in September. Newport emphasises why September with a similar response Acuff gives, namely the start of the school year.

September offers the same sense of change in pace at work, as most white collar work tends to intensify in September as vacations are put aside, a new quarter is starting, and year end goals get closer to the year ending.

There’s also a jump start effect. Both Newport and Acuff highlight you get to change radically in the next four months when everyone else has decided to give it a go in the dead of winter beginning January 1st. You will have four months of highly dedicated foundations of discipline, vision building, habit ingraining, and so on. Others will be scraping snow off their car January 1st beginning a trek to the gym for the first time in 340 days.

I’ve just given you all the reasons why to get going this September. The how is out there in numerous books, podcasts, and even from Newport and Acuff’s writings. Many modules, trainings, formats are available and would significantly add to this post’s length. Just start with one of those two authors and you’ll be well on your way to radical change.

Discipline

What I am most curious about myself is the intersection of attention and goal achievement. I am ever more convinced we are distracted away from radical change (or more correctly, distracted into uninvited change like weight gain, missed deadlines, mass social media consumption where you understand the history of memes more than the history of current events, etc).

This is where discipline certainly comes into play. Newport lays his foundation for radical four month change in discipline. Which reminded me of Ryan Holiday’s book Discipline is Destiny.

From the life of Booker T. Washington, Holiday offers up this anecdote on keeping the main thing the main thing. Washington was a very ambitious man involved in many initiatives. But he was able to participate in those because he leveraged the power of no.

You must first ask these sorts of questions Holiday provides:

What am I doing? What are my priorities? What is the most important contribution I make – to my work, to my family, to the world? Then comes the discipline to ignore just about everything else.

Discipline Is Destiny, P 117

The daily grind is brimming with distractions from all angles. It’s all the distractions you were accustomed to not only on August 31, but all the previous dates.

Distraction reigns supreme as the enemy when attempting big change, but even more so small, incremental daily shifts in the right direction.

Once you identify your goal, you break it down to the daily. You find what you can do daily which contributes to this lofty change.

Which is why discipline can take the pragmatic form of “large, uninterrupted blocks of focused time. And yet, how many people organize their days or lives to make this possible (p 118)?” Holiday and many others offering up change advice discuss how you have to schedule these uninterrupted blocks of focused time in order to keep the main thing the main thing. Maintain these blocks of time. Guard them. And treat them like you’re on the clock.

Distraction lurks around every corner when we are attempting a radical shift. And we get so easily tripped up in the daily. But adding even an element of fear setting (what happens if I don’t do this change activity, how will I end up in October, November…..January?!) will provide the daily boost when we are unmotivated to dedicate focused time towards our change goal.

There’s no better time than the now. But I can argue along with others, September is one swell time to get moving on your change goal.